Swami Agnivesh, a revered longtime campaigner in opposition to teenager labor and indentured servitude in India, died on Sept. 11 in New Delhi. He was 80.
His demise, in a hospital, was confirmed by an affiliate, Zayauddin Jawed, who talked about the set off was quite a lot of organ failure.
A pacifist Hindu monk who renounced worldly possessions and relations at a youthful age, Mr. Agnivesh led a decades-long marketing campaign in opposition to village moneylenders, landlords and brick kiln householders who pressured landless, debt-ridden farmers into bonded labor, or indentured servitude.
In 1981 he based mostly the Bandhua Mukti Morcha, or the Bonded Labour Liberation Entrance, which he headed until his demise. From 1994 to 2004, he was chairman of the United Nations Voluntary Perception Fund on Fashionable Varieties of Slavery.
“The nation is diminished by his passing,” Shashi Tharoor, one among India’s most influential opposition politicians, wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Agnivesh was a distinguished champion of many social justice causes and a trusted mediator when conflicts arose. He fought on behalf of tribal communities that had few rights to land possession regardless that they populated a number of the nation’s forests. Inside the 1980s, when environmentalists objected to settling bonded laborers on protected forest land, he helped defuse the state of affairs, understanding a compromise whereby a number of the forest would proceed to be preserved.
In 2011, after Maoist rebels kidnapped 5 regulation enforcement officers, leading to an 18-day hostage catastrophe in Chhattisgarh state, in central India, he helped negotiate their release.
“He had a steely braveness, and big compassion,” talked about Ramachandra Guha, a pre-eminent Indian historian who knew Mr. Agnivesh for over three a very long time.
In latest occasions, as Hindu nationalism continued to rise in India, Mr. Agnivesh was one among its biggest critics, saying the core values on which the republic was based mostly have been beneath strain. He wrote last year, “The democratic home — the place these values are speculated to prevail — is communalized, polarized and poisoned with hate.”
John Dayal, a fellow human-rights activist, talked about of Mr. Agnivesh: “His important downside was the fundamentalist Hindu.”
“The politicalizing of Hinduism and the hijacking of sacred symbolisms for political options — he abhorred all of it,” Mr. Dayal talked about.
Mr. Guha talked about he had admired Mr. Agnivesh’s “willingness to position his life on the highway in safety of the inclusive and plural faith he himself practiced.”
Mr. Agnivesh was overwhelmed many cases; in a single incident a mob of Hindu nationalists stripped, kicked and punched him, accusing him of inciting tribal groups to battle the federal authorities. He was glad, he talked about later, that that they’d speculated to kill him.
Swami Agnivesh was born Vepa Shyam Rao on Sep. 21, 1939, into an orthodox Hindu Brahmin family inside the Srikakulam district of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
His father, Vepa Laxmi Narsinham, a farmer, died when Mr. Agnivesh was 4 years outdated. His mother, Sita Devi, a homemaker, died a 12 months later. After he misplaced his mom and father, he was launched up by his maternal grandfather. He left no speedy survivors.
Mr. Agnivesh studied regulation and commerce on the School of Calcutta and, after graduating, turned a professor of administration analysis at St. Xavier’s College inside the Indian state of West Bengal.
He briefly practiced regulation, nevertheless rapidly left to work inside the northern states of Haryana and Punjab, every of them notorious for bonded labor. For his work in opposition to teenager labor there he was awarded the Correct Livelihood Award for humanitarian work in 2004, given by a Swedish-based foundation.
Mr. Agnivesh spent 14 months in jail after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a nationwide emergency in 1975, jailing political opponents and activists.
He fought in opposition to Mrs. Gandhi’s Indian Nationwide Congress event, was elected to the state Legislative Assembly in Haryana and was named a cabinet minister in Haryana. Nevertheless he served merely four months, pushed out after he protested in opposition to his private authorities, demanding an inquiry into the killing of 10 employees in an industrial township in a battle with police.
That episode led him to dedicate his life to stopping bonded labor.
